The Fragility of Bodies

by Sergio Olguin

  After various twists and turns she arrived at Romanín’s criminal courtroom. The judge had not yet arrived, but five minutes later he appeared. He apologized for the delay, gave some instructions to his staff and asked for two coffees. He ushered her into his office. For all the efforts he made to stay young, Romanín was an older man now, not far off retirement. Verónica didn’t know exactly how he was connected to her father, but from the way he spoke, she gathered that there was some affection between them. He even knew that her mother had died five years ago.

  “Did you receive a copy of the dead man’s letter?”

  “Yes, thank you, Doctor, I got it this morning.”

  “The man clearly wanted to commit suicide. He shot himself in the temple, then fell from the roof.”

  “There’s no possibility he was coerced into going to the building’s edge and shot there?”

  “No. The expert evidence all points to him holding the gun in his right hand. There were also traces of gunshot residue. There’s nothing to suggest he had any enemies.”

  “In the letter he talks about four murders. Is anything known about those?”

  The judge sprawled in his chair and smiled at her.

  “If you’re asking because you believe the deceased was murdered, I’m afraid I have to disappoint you.”

  He searched among the files on his desk, taking off his glasses to see better close-up. He read something in an incomprehensible whisper, put the folder down, put his glasses back on and continued:

  “The poor man hadn’t killed anyone. Bah, sensu stricto he had, but no judge would ever have convicted him, even though he was under arrest for a few hours. Carranza was a train driver on the Sarmiento railway. And he ran over four people. On different occasions, over a period of three years.”

  “You mean the four deaths he refers to in his letter were the result of train accidents?”

  “Suicides, misadventure. Accidents – yes. I have the worksheets here provided by Trenes de Buenos Aires, the concession holder, where the four fatal incidents are recorded.”

  “Is one a child?”

  “Exactly. Yes, a nomen nescio, a John Doe. It was never possible to identify the body, and nobody came forward to claim it.”

  They both fell silent. Verónica tried to fit this new information into the scenario she had been mentally building.

  “So Carranza killed himself because he ran over four people in separate accidents.”

  “Apparently the engine drivers get quite traumatized. In fact, here’s an interesting detail for you: that man fell from the building where he used to see his psychologist. He had been sent for therapy by the company. We spoke to the psychotherapist and, even allowing for patient confidentiality, he told us everything we needed to know: Carranza had been shaken by the accidents, and perhaps that sparked a suicidal tendency that was already there.”

  “I can see it must be a terrifying experience to run someone over with a train, but would that actually lead you to take your own life?”

  “Look, Verónica, we judge the facts. And very often the intentions. But, to be frank with you, we know very little about the real reasons that lead people to become criminals, to kill or to commit suicide. That’s the job of psychologists and people like you – journalists.”

  “Journalists,” Verónica repeated. “Once upon a time, poets were the ones who knew most about the heart’s secrets. Things have come to a pretty pass if we’re relying on psychologists and journalists now.”

  She asked if she could see the original letter. The judge found it in his folder and passed it to her. A shiver ran down her spine. On this page, torn from an exercise book, in this uneven handwriting, the dead man ceased to be an abstract entity and became a real person. Death was in these written words much more than it was in a corpse.

  She handed him back the letter and had stood up to say goodbye when a doubt occurred to her.

  “Just one other thing: has all this information been corroborated by the family?”

  “We’ve spoken to his wife. In cases like this the family is very stricken. She told us that she had imagined something like this could happen and that she couldn’t forgive herself for not having done more to prevent it. You see, guilt is like an oil stain transferred from one body to the next: someone jumps in front of a train – for whatever reason – triggering guilt in the driver that in turn leads him to suicide, which then makes a loved one feel guilty for not taking enough precautions. And I’m sure that she did take them, that the driver did what he could with the train, that the first suicide should have given life another chance. What can one say?…I don’t want to get maudlin.”

  If anyone had asked Verónica which streets she walked down in the half hour following her interview with Romanín, she would have struggled to reconstruct the route. Her mind was completely focussed on the new information the judge had given her. Somehow, though, she had ended up in a bar on Avenida de Mayo, where she was now reading the suicide note yet again. There were so many loose ends in the confession that it was impossible to be satisfied with Romanín’s explanation. Judges – as she had once said during an argument with her father (a few years ago now, when they still argued about such things) – don’t want to deliver justice but to close cases. If the clues and evidence pointed to the guilt or innocence of the accused, they acted accordingly. They never dwelt on or worried about the deeper causes, about the motives that underlay what was self-evident. That was why, as Verónica told her father, she preferred being a journalist: she crossed the line at which the judges stopped. The conscience of a magistrate – she had declared passionately, mindful of her father’s growing anger – is happy with the most superficial forms of justice.

  And Romanín struck Verónica as one of those judges who are happy with little. A guy shoots himself and jumps from a rooftop. Suicide. Case closed. Bring out the next one.

  Carranza had committed suicide, no doubt about that. He had killed four people while driving his train. He was getting therapy for the trauma those accidents had caused him. Going on what the letter said, he had been able to deal with the first three deaths, those of the adults, but not the last, the child’s. And that was the point where the letter started to reveal more than what was written.

  I knew that day that I would kill him. How could Carranza have known that he was going to run the child down? Or was this simply a way of expressing himself? A kind of premonition?

  That it would fall to me. To him and not to someone else? Would it fall to him by chance, or for some reason? What was that reason, if there was one?

  We all knew it. The change from singular to plural struck Verónica as the clearest sign that this was more than a simple suicide. And that plural implied various people. Who? If they all knew, it was not a premonition but a foregone conclusion. And if they had known that this would happen, why had they not tried to prevent it?

  All the way round I was waiting to come across them. Another troubling plural. He had run over a child who was not alone. How had the other one escaped injury? Or had someone pushed the child under the train? If so, then there was a criminal involved who was not the driver. Did Carranza know him? Had there been some sort of arrangement between them?

  At that moment I wanted to kill them. Both of them. Just for being there, for wanting to ruin my life. But when they appeared I didn’t want to kill them any more. That abrupt change in mood reminded Verónica of something that had happened recently: she had never run over anyone, but a little while ago a motorcyclist had crossed in front of the car her sister Leticia had lent her. Her first reaction had been terror at the thought of crashing into someone but afterwards, after frantically applying the brakes to avoid an accident, she had felt a dreadful desire to run over that idiot in the helmet, who was still progressing down Avenida Córdoba without a care in the world. Perhaps that was what had happened to Carranza. He felt like killing because he had experienced the terror of being in a position to kill.

  There were too
many doubts to resolve alone. She called her editor. She would see her at the magazine anyway, but this was something that couldn’t wait until the afternoon. Besides, she knew that Patricia didn’t mind being called at any time if it was about work.

  “I’m literally as lost as the characters in Lost,” she replied when Patricia asked her how the investigation was going.

  “So – have crimes been committed here, or not?”

  “Judge Romanín says not. Carranza ran over four people in separate accidents. Three men and a boy.”

  “I figured as much yesterday when you suggested the piece.”

  It annoyed her that her editor should be a step ahead of the rest of them, the journalistic pack.

  “Why didn’t you say anything, then?”

  “Because figuring something isn’t the same as knowing it. A basic principle, not much taught in journalism schools.”

  “Something in that letter doesn’t add up – lots of things don’t. There’s something fishy about it, Pato. I don’t know what, but there’s definitely something going on.”

  “So I won’t cross off the piece for this week?”

  “Cross it off for this week, definitely, but I’m going to keep investigating. I need to find a way in.”

  “Have you worked out what to do next?”

  “I need to find out more about the people who died. And speak to someone from Trenes de Buenos Aires.”

  “Over what period of time did he run over the four people?”

  “Three years.”

  “If I ran over someone in my car I’d never drive again.”

  “A person has to work.”

  “An employee kills four people in three years and the company lets him keep working in that capacity? It’d be good to find out if there are other train drivers in the same situation. How many deaths are there a year? What’s the protocol when a driver runs over someone?”

  “I don’t think that’s the kind of information the PR person at TBA is going to give me.”

  “You mean the spokesperson. That kind of company has a spokesperson, just like ministries.”

  “Is a spokesperson any more likely to be helpful?”

  “No. But first you should try to resolve the doubts you have about the letter. Start with the driver’s family. Try to speak to someone close to him, and perhaps they’ll suggest a way into the company.”

  Patricia always knew which way a journalist should go. Where others were myopic – or completely blind – she saw clearly. It was a quality that inspired both admiration and irritation in Verónica, because she couldn’t help feeling that she would have reached the same conclusion five minutes later. But Pato always got there first. Like a good chess player, she thought one or several moves ahead.

  Verónica called Judge Romanín on his mobile phone, apologizing for bothering him again.

  “Do you happen to know where Carranza’s wake is?”

  “It’s already finished. He must be on his way to the cemetery in Avellaneda by now. They were going to bury him at midday.”

  She paid for the coffee, went outside and hailed a taxi. With any luck she could get to the funeral before the mourners dispersed.

  VI

  Unfortunately, she didn’t know where in Avellaneda the cemetery was. Her knowledge of that area was limited to the home grounds of Independiente and Racing, the train station, the street leading to the soccer grounds, Calle Alsina and Avenida Mitre. It seemed like a bad idea to arrive at the cemetery in a taxi from the capital: it would attract too much attention. So she asked the taxi driver to take her as far as 500 Avenida Mitre (wherever that was – she hoped it existed).

  On the way she called her sister Daniela. They had arranged to have lunch together, but it was going to be impossible to get there on time. She felt a little guilty cancelling it, because she very often had to call off arrangements with her sisters. It was bad luck that something came up every time they were due to meet. They thought she was making excuses. Verónica didn’t want to believe that this was symptomatic of some phobia brought on by family life.

  Soon after they had crossed the Pueyrredón bridge and were on Avenida Belgrano, Verónica spotted a minicab company and asked the taxi driver to drop her there. It would be better to continue the journey in a local cab.

  This second driver took her right to the information office, inside the cemetery itself. There she found out that Carranza’s interment must already be under way, a few hundred yards away. She asked the driver to wait for her and set off alone to find the plot where she had been told the mourners would be. The previous days’ rain had left puddles on the path and there was a smell of damp earth. If she disregarded the tombs around her, she felt as though she were walking through a muddy field.

  In the distance she saw a sizeable group of people standing in the place to which she had been directed. She walked towards them without hurrying. There must have been about thirty people, perhaps more. She had never been good at calculating the number of people present at any event. Verónica stood at the back of the group, hoping to seem like a member of the funeral party, not a busybody. Her arrival had coincided with the moment the coffin was lowered into the grave. The mourners pressed forward to throw handfuls of earth onto the coffin. The sound of loud sobbing helped her to pick out the people who must be Carranza’s wife and children: the three of them clinging together as a single body, as though wrapped in a magnetic cape that prevented anyone else from joining the embrace or consoling them. There was also a woman who walked up to the grave, threw in a handful of dirt and stood staring into it as though waiting for something to happen, for reality to change and for the dead man to emerge from the grave. Someone approached the woman, gently took her by the shoulders and led her away. To one side of the grave was a group of unaccompanied men: they must be Carranza’s fellow workers. She counted them, to be sure of the number: nine. They looked serious, neither crying nor consoling each other. Verónica wished that she had been present when the cortège arrived, to see which of his colleagues had carried the coffin from the hearse to the grave. She tried to make out gestures, anything to help her deduce which of the men was a greater friend of Carranza’s than the others. But there was nothing. They were a block, distinct from the rest of the mourners, a separate group within the funeral party. For a moment it seemed to her that one of them stood out from the rest. She kept watching him, but she didn’t see anything more to back up her hunch.

  The burial ceremony was over. The people returned to their cars. The co-workers made for the exit. Verónica was thinking of going up to talk to them when she heard an older man say to the elderly lady who was with him:

  “Did you give your condolences to the sister?”

  “To whom?” asked the woman, louder. She must be a little deaf.

  “To Carina, Alfredo’s sister.”

  The old couple walked towards the woman who had stood longer than usual beside the grave. Verónica followed them.

  Both of them greeted the woman, who must have been about forty-five. She thanked them, looking dazed, and the couple moved to one side. Verónica walked up to the woman then and gave her a kiss, as though she too had been a friend of the dead man. The woman must have been greeted in similar fashion by many people she didn’t know that day.

  “Carina, forgive me for bothering you at such an awful time.”

  “Were you a friend of Alfredo?”

  “No, I’m a journalist. I don’t want to intrude, but I wondered if I could talk to you about your brother at some point.”

  The woman gave her a sullen look. A man started walking towards them.

  “My brother committed suicide. There’s nothing else to say.”

  The man took Carina gently by the arm and told her that he would walk her to the car, which was parked about fifty yards away. Carina let herself be led. Verónica kept pace with them both.

  “Your brother suffered a great deal. And the company he worked for did nothing for him.”

 
; “They paid for a psychiatrist or something,” said Carina, without looking at her.

  “I believe that the company is responsible for what happened to your brother.” She took the woman’s hand and placed her business card in it. “Here’s my number. Please call me.”

  Carina nodded briefly, either in agreement or as a way of asking her to go away, which Verónica did immediately. She doubted that Carina would call, but if she did not do so in the next few days, she would think of another way to find her.

  VII

  The weekend was uneventful. On Friday night she went to Bar Martataka, knowing that some of her friends would be there. By the time she arrived, Alma, Marian, The Other Verónica and Pili, sometimes known as Spanish Pili, were already there. Absent were Paula – who had to look after her son – and some girls who were variously on holiday, in relationships or sitting at home depressed, eating chocolate and binge-watching box sets.

  She was in need of her friends and their debauchery, of their light-hearted, boastful and mercilessly cynical conversation about the rest of humanity, especially the men who passed through their lives or paraded themselves in the bar that night. A few tables away was a group of men she knew. In fact, in terms of age and profession, this coterie was quite similar to theirs. It included the odd journalist, a writer supporting himself with workshops, a psychologist and a philosophy teacher. What with various comings and goings, and trips outside to smoke, by around 11 p.m. half the girls’ group had moved over to the boys’ table, and vice versa. Verónica had ended up on the same table as the writer who lived off his workshops. He was telling her she ought to write fiction.

  “Whenever I read your pieces I notice how well written they are. You’ve got such a good style – I think you should write novels or short stories. Don’t you agree?”

  “Well, such a forthright observation doesn’t leave me much room to think about it.”

  “Seriously. You’re very good. And hot. You’re very hot. Let’s make a deal,” the writer continued. “I give you a grant to come to my workshop and you —”